A Technique for Modeling and Simulating Transistor Based MEMS Sensors

MEMS inertial sensors are used in handheld smart devices such as smartphones and smart watches to detect and monitor physical activities. The most common transduction techniques used are based on piezoelectric [1], piezoresistive [2] or capacitive [3] techniques. The performance of these sensors is limited by passive detection, the need of a functional material, area of electrode, converter and amplifier circuits in the front end of read-out network. Suspended gate FET (SGFET) based sensors are being investigated as an alternative type of inertial sensor that offers in-built amplification as well as eliminates the aforementioned limitations. The suspended gate SGFET is an active transducer and has the potential for monolithic integration with CMOS.